


A Misadventure

by Sherlocked_Gallifreyan



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, originally written September 2016, probably won't be continued
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-28
Updated: 2017-09-28
Packaged: 2019-01-06 12:17:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12211125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sherlocked_Gallifreyan/pseuds/Sherlocked_Gallifreyan
Summary: A tulpa turns Cas and Gabe into cats, and Sam and Dean work to protect a little girl and her mother from an abusive husband.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I completely forgot about this story. I was using google docs to store websites for a project for one of my classes and saw this in my docs. I did catch a couple errors reading over it, but I may have missed some. If you catch any, let me know.
> 
> Gabe is a long-haired gold munchkin with yellow eyes and faint tabby markings. Cas is pretty close to a Russian blue with blueish eyes.

Dean woke to an unfamiliar weight on the small of his back. He reached behind him and felt for the source of the weight: a warm furry body purring roughly. His mind blanked. Since when did they have a cat? At his touch, the cat stirred, standing and stretching, paws digging painfully into Dean's back. Dean shifted so he lay on his back, successfully displacing the cat.

Right. The tulpa. Cas and Gabe being turned into cats. "Mornin', Cas," Dean grunted. Cas meowed.

Dean sat up and swung his legs off the bed so he faced Sam, also awake and taking pictures of Gabe, who was sleeping on his back, tail hanging off the bed, stubby legs twitching comically.

Cas jumped from Dean's bed to Sam's, the impact of his landing jerking Gabe awake. Gabe sat on his haunches and rubbed his face with his forepaws, the gesture absurdly human. On his haunches like that, he could look Cas in the eye. When he dropped into a sitting position, he disappeared behind a large fold in the rumpled blankets. Tufted ears twitched restlessly.

***

Dean returned from Wal-Mart with cat food and litter boxes. The angelic felines slept, so it would follow that they had the same biological needs of normal cats. While Dean shopped, Sam checked Cas and Gabe out of their hotel room and moved their stuff into his and Dean's room.

Sam raised an eyebrow at the pet supplies and Dean shrugged. If they didn't need the stuff, he'd just return it. He insisted on only one thing: that the angels wear collars with their names and Sam and Dean's numbers inscribed on the tags. The last thing they needed was for Cas and Gabe to end up in some shelter. Cas took more readily to the idea of wearing a collar than Gabe. In Gabe's mind, he was trickster-angel over cat; Cas accepted his current lot as cat over angel. Last night, quite by accident, Gabe had discovered he had regained some small bit of his mojo: very short-distance teleportation, a foot in any given direction, still unable to move through time or alter reality.

After 45 minutes and 14 candy bars (given hesitantly with no small concern for his health by the Winchesters), Gabe relented and allowed Dean to fasten the collar around his neck. "It's just until we can get you normal," Dean said. Gabe had no doubt this was meant to be reassuring, but he was not enjoying the stubby, stubby legs that came with this form. He didn't want to be stuck with them for any longer than necessary.

***

Cas's constant meowing grated against Dean's nerves and kept him from sleeping. Somehow, Sam slept soundly through the noise, much to Dean's envy. "Cas, shut  _ up  _ already," he groaned, dragging a pillow over his face.

"Dean," a rough, familiar voice said. Dean bolted upright, staring at the slightly darker shape that was Cas, whose meows had turned into repetition of Dean's name.

"Can you, uh, can you say anything else?" Dean asked, now careful to  _ not  _ wake Sam in case he was dreaming. Cas shook his head, then curled up and shut his eyes. Dean lay back down, shoving the incident out of his mind.

***

Gabe nearly scared the shit out of the brothers as when he zapped himself onto the table between them as they enjoyed their morning coffee.

"He just -- you just," Sam stammered, looking from Gabe to Dean to Cas and back again. "When did...?" Gabe meowed plaintively and raised his forepaws in a very human shrugging motion. "Still can't talk," the gesture said.

"Cas said my name last night," Dean blurted. It seemed perfectly reasonable in light of Gabe zapping around the room, reveling in his apparently newly-regained ability. Sam turned to Cas, eyebrows raised expectantly.

"Dean," Cas said. "Sam." He'd mastered Sam's name in the early hours of the morning. Words formed more easily as time passed, but he did wonder why Gabe wasn't recovering speech first as well. Maybe it had something to do with their respective angelic powers. Truth was, Gabe hadn't bothered testing his ability to talk; he'd been trying to regain his ability to shape reality. Maybe with that back, he could fix Cas and himself. Simply put, Cas and Gabe had different priorities and motives.

Over the next three days, Sam and Dean rid the town of the tulpa, Cas attained the vocabulary of a six year old and could feel his wings again, and Gabe regained his ability to warp their surroundings but not their individual persons. He seemed reluctant to make any attempts at human speech despite cajoling and encouragement from Sam, Dean, and Cas.


	2. Chapter 2

Janine Winston woke her four-year-old daughter, bundled her into her jacket and shoes, and drove to the hotel on the card the shorter of the two agents had given her if James Winston hurt her or Cath again.

So it happened that she found herself knocking on the door of room #4 in a shady motel, split lip smarting and eye swollen shut. Cath shivered and tightly clutched her mother’s hand. The door swung open and Janine fully expected to see at least one of the agents standing there. She certainly didn't expect to see two cats staring up at her. Cath scrunched her face in a confused frown. She thought the agents had been people when they visited last week.

"You haven't seen Agents Bartell and Wessen, have you?" Janine asked in the light tone reserved for asking pets serious questions.

"Sam and Dean will be back," a rough voice said. Janine stared intensely at the larger, darker cat. The voice had come from that vicinity. "You can wait inside." The cat spoke. He spoke. In a manner she'd expect from the Matrix, the smaller cat appeared to glitch out and reappeared on the table. To Cath with her vivid imagination, these magical cats were the best things ever. She ran in and climbed onto a chair, reaching to pet the gold-furred cat. Janine followed move slowly, shutting and locking the door behind her.

"So, uh, what are your names?" Janine asked the dark brown cat, slipping off her shoes and sitting on the bed closer to the table.

"I'm Castiel," he said, then gestured with a bushy tail toward the other one: "My brother Gabriel."

"I'm Janine," she said, "and that's my daughter Cath." She watched Gabriel and Cath for a few minutes, thanking God the cat was willing to put up with a slightly clumsy four year old. "Can he not talk?"

Castiel flicked his left ear twice, something he'd taken to doing when unsure how to proceed. "No," he said at last. Gabe, having had enough of the child pulling at his fur, zapped himself to his safer perch on the window sill.

Half an hour later, the low rumble of the Impala's engine woke Cas and Gabe. Janine and Cath had fallen asleep on Dean's bed. Gabe zapped Cas outside so he could tell the Winchesters about their visitors and that they should enter as quietly as possible, leaving the lights off. Dean scooped Cas off the still-warm hood of the Impala and followed Sam into their room. The lights from the parking lot cast a dull yellow glow into the room which Gabe's eyes reflected eerily from the window sill.

Dean let Sam have the remaining bed and slept upright in one of the chairs for the rest of the night.

***

Cath woke first. She sat up groggily and rubbed her eyes, her soft blonde hair sticking up wildly. The nice agents from last week were sleeping in the room now, too. She couldn't see the cats; maybe the agents really had been cats last night.

Janine, feeling Cath stir, woke up. The bruises from last night smarted as she sat up. Agent Bartell slept in the other bed, tangled in the blankets, but Agent Wessen slept awkwardly in one of the chairs.

"I'm hungry," Cath tried to whisper. The agents snapped awake. Wessen grimaced and rubbed the back of his neck while Bartell offered a sympathetic shrug.  Dean, despite feeling far too old to be sleeping in chairs like that, never considered taking the bed for himself; Sammy still came first. He stretched the kinks out  as best he could, then moved to sit beside Janine. 

"He do this to you?" he asked, referring to the bruises and split lip. She nodded.

"We waited until he was asleep before we left," she said, hating how cliche it sounded. "Your... your cats let us in."

"They're not exactly cats," Sam said, looking around for the angelic felines.

"They're magic!" Cath interjected.

***

The four of them went to breakfast without having seen Cas or Gabe. As angels, they would disappear sometimes, and cats were known to wander, only to return home safely in time for dinner. Cas and Gabe were probably fine.


End file.
